What's the option if I want to learn Bazel to an intermediate level and I don't work with former Googlers?
There's a decent number of Hello World examples around, and I can get moving with some rulesets, but using it for more than toy projects seems to be really hard for me and there's not a lot of intermediate content from what I can tell. There's "Advanced" reference materials, and countless "getting started" tutorials, but rarely is there anything relating to best practices or even what constitutes good rules.
Seems like most of the hobby community prefers NIX for deterministic builds too, so the situation is not improving for novices like myself who really like the idea of hermitic builds, monorepo's and distributed cache.
Most Google engineers don't do anything more complicated than the hello world examples. Probably far less complicated because they don't need to do any repo setup, it all just works out of the box. Most engineers just make simple java build targets. Larger teams would have someone who specializes in tweaking the build and writes Skylark rules, but to other engineers they just look like simple build targets.
I'd suggest finding an open source project and playing with it locally. Try to get everything building and running, including unit tests. Make the build as granular as you can. Try to pick a project that has a variety of kinds of things that need to be built, like Java, C++, Protobufs, etc. Then look for patterns in the build targets you wrote and see if you can refactor them to simplify it with custom Skylark rules.
> Bazel is designed to be optimal and has perfect knowledge of the state of the world, yet it’s too slow for quick operations.
This is one of the biggest challenges where Bazel falls short of non-Bazel tooling for us in the Web development/Node.js world. The Node ecosystem has characteristics that push Bazel scaling (node_modules is 100k+ files and 1GB+), and Bazel's insistence on getting builds correct/reproducible is in a way its own enemy. Bazel needs to set up 100s of thousands of file watchers to be correct, but the Node.js ecosystem's "let's just assume that node_modules hasn't changed" is good enough most of the time. For us, many non-Bazel inner devloop steps inflate from <5s to >60s after Bazel overhead, even after significant infra tuning.
It's not unique to Bazel. Nix also struggles with Node.js. I'm not too fond of either solution, but to me, the problem lies in the Node ecosystem, and it seems unlikely a "language-agnostic" tool will ever be able to crack that nut.
Node also struggles with Node.js, and that's including its shortcuts that kill reproducibility. A node.js sync from an empty cache is by far the longest part of any build process I maintain. It's still a long step with a full cache and without doing anything.
I'd love to hear more about the relationship between Buck2 and Bazel such that they share a conference. Sure, they are quite similar systems and both use Starlark DSL, but is there a long term vision of these projects belonging "together" or even merging? Or was Buck2 a one-off guest?
Buck 2 was part of the "Build Meetup", not BazelCon, which is a more-frequent event that has room for more than just Bazel (although it's still pretty focused on Bazel-related topics and similar build systems). More details at https://meetup.build/
Any conference recommendations? I'm tracking 2024 and 2025 software engineering conferences. There are still several marquee conferences before year end if that's your thing.
So it's 2024, and the plan is that we're going to wait another few years for BSP to be finished before vscode support is anything more than a toy?
If their goal is adoption, that is just _awful_ pathfinding. Probably harkens the beginning of a death spiral for the project, if I'm to make a prediction.
We have giant Go monorepo at work. Bazel build. The ex-Google guy who set it up, left. No one around who wants to put in the time to learn it. It seems like a general increase in complexity. It seems to replace the go mod stuff so we have something called gazelle that figured it out and third party ide plug-ins. The plug in for IntelliJ is janky. To top it all off, somehow we managed to get a build that is slow locally, slow on CI.
We had the same setup, ex-Googler SRE demanded builds be done with Bazel for our Go monorepo. He convinced someone to switch it all over, all builds, deploys, CI, testing, etc were all dependent on Bazel.
That person left, and the Bazel stuff was left unmaintained as no one had the interest nor time to learn it.
Later Bazel decide to kill off rules_docker and replace it with rules_oci, which means we can no longer update our Golang version without a super painful migration where we end up breaking production a bunch of times because of quirks in the super difficult migration.
Eventually we invested the time to rip the whole thing out and replace it with standard Go tooling with a multistage docker build for the container image. Everything from running tests, using Golang tooling, legibility of builds, CI, and deploys is easier.
The best thing we did was remove it and move to standard Golang tooling.
This amazes me since I switched to go because its builds are so insanely fast and the module system is quite clean. Out of all the languages, go probably needs it the least!
I did use bazel long ago for c++ and it was quite good at it, but we didn’t have very many dependencies.
There's a decent number of Hello World examples around, and I can get moving with some rulesets, but using it for more than toy projects seems to be really hard for me and there's not a lot of intermediate content from what I can tell. There's "Advanced" reference materials, and countless "getting started" tutorials, but rarely is there anything relating to best practices or even what constitutes good rules.
Seems like most of the hobby community prefers NIX for deterministic builds too, so the situation is not improving for novices like myself who really like the idea of hermitic builds, monorepo's and distributed cache.
reply